Modified Traces Of A Like Practice, Not Carried To The Same Extent
Of Oddity, Are Also Found In A Variety Of Countries Besides Those That
Have Been Named, As In Borneo, In Kamtchatka, And In Greenland.
In nearly
all cases some particular diet, or abstinence from certain kinds of food
and drink, and from exertion, is prescribed to the father; in some, more
positive and trying penances are inflicted.
Butler had no doubt our Traveller's story in his head when he made the
widow in Hudibras allude in a ribald speech to the supposed fact
that
- "Chineses go to bed
And lie in, in their ladies' stead."
The custom is humorously introduced, as Pauthier has noticed, in the
Mediaeval Fabliau of Aucasin and Nicolete. Aucasin arriving at the
castle of Torelore asks for the king and is told he is in child-bed. Where
then is his wife? She is gone to the wars and has taken all the people
with her. Aucasin, greatly astonished, enters the palace, and wanders
through it till he comes to the chamber where the king lay: -
"En le canbre entre Aucasins
Li cortois et li gentis;
Il est venus dusqu'au lit
Alec u li Rois se gist.
Pardevant lui s'arestit
Si parla, Oes que dist;
Diva fau, que fais-tu ci?
Dist le Rois, Je gis d'un fil,
Quant mes mois sera complis,
Et ge serai bien garis,
Dont irai le messe oir
Si comme mes ancessor fist," etc.
Aucasin pulls all the clothes off him, and cudgels him soundly, making him
promise that never a man shall lie in again in his country.
This strange custom, if it were unique, would look like a coarse practical
joke, but appearing as it does among so many different races and in every
quarter of the world, it must have its root somewhere deep in the
psychology of the uncivilised man. I must refer to Mr. Tylor's interesting
remarks on the rationale of the custom, for they do not bear abridgment.
Professor Max Mueller humorously suggests that "the treatment which a
husband receives among ourselves at the time of his wife's confinement,
not only from mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and other female relations,
but from nurses, and from every consequential maid-servant in the house,"
is but a "survival," as Mr. Tylor would call it, of the couvade; or
at least represents the same feeling which among those many uncivilised
nations thus drove the husband to his bed, and sometimes (as among the
Caribs) put him when there to systematic torture.
(Tylor Researches, 288-296; Michel, Le Pays Basque, p. 201;
Sketches of the Meau-tsze, transl. by Bridgman in J. of North China
Br. of R. As. Soc., p. 277; Hudibras, Pt. III., canto I. 707; Fabliaus
et Contes par Barbazan, ed. Meon, I. 408-409; Indian Antiq. III. 151;
Mueller's Chips, II. 227 seqq.; many other references in TYLOR, and in a
capital monograph by Dr. H.H. Ploss of Leipzig, received during revision
of this sheet: 'Das Mannerkindbett.' What a notable example of the
German power of compounding is that title!)
[This custom seems to be considered generally as a survival of the
matriarchate in a society with a patriarchal regime. We may add to the
list of authorities on this subject: E. Westermarck, Hist. of Human
Marriage, 106, seqq.; G. A. Wilken, De Couvade bij de Volken v.d.
Indischen Archipel, Bijdr. Ind. Inst., 5th ser., iv. p. 250. Dr. Ernest
Martin, late physician of the French Legation at Peking, in an article on
La Couvade en Chine (Revue Scientifique, 24th March, 1894), gave a
drawing representing the couvade from a sketch by a native artist.
In the China Review (XI. pp. 401-402), "Lao Kwang-tung" notes these
interesting facts: "The Chinese believe that certain actions performed by
the husband during the pregnancy of his wife will affect the child. If a
dish of food on the table is raised by putting another dish, or anything
else below it, it is not considered proper for a husband, who is expecting
the birth of a child, to partake of it, for fear the two dishes should
cause the child to have two tongues. It is extraordinary that the caution
thus exercised by the Chinese has not prevented many of them from being
double-tongued. This result, it is supposed, however, will only happen if
the food so raised is eaten in the house in which the future mother
happens to be. It is thought that the pasting up of the red papers
containing antithetical and felicitous sentences on them, as at New Year's
time, by a man under similar circumstances, and this whether the future
mother sees the action performed or not, will cause the child to have red
marks on the face or any part of the body. The causes producing naevi
materni have probably been the origin of such marks, rather than the idea
entertained by the Chinese that the father, having performed an action by
some occult mode, influences the child yet unborn. A case is said to have
occurred in which ill effects were obviated, or rather obliterated, by the
red papers being torn down, after the birth of the infant, and soaked in
water, when as the red disappeared from the paper, so the child's face
assumed a natural hue. Lord Avebury also speaks of la couvade as
existing among the Chinese of West Yun-Nan. (Origin of Civilisation and
Primitive Condition of Man, p. 18)."
Dr. J.A.H. Murray, editor of the New English Dictionary, wrote, in
The Academy, of 29th October, 1892, a letter with the heading of
Couvade, The Genesis of an Anthropological Term, which elicited an
answer from Dr. E.B. Tylor (Academy, 5th November): "Wanting a general
term for such customs," writes Dr. Tylor, "and finding statements in books
that this male lying-in lasted on till modern times, in the south of
France, and was there called couvade, that is brooding or hatching
(couver), I adopted this word for the set of customs, and it has since
become established in English." The discussion was carried on in The
Academy, 12th and 19th November, 10th and 17th December; Mr. A.L. Mayhew
wrote (12th November): "There is no doubt whatever that Dr. Tylor and
Professor Max Mueller (in a review of Dr. Tylor's book) share the glory of
having given a new technical sense to an old provincial French word, and
of seeing it accepted in France, and safely enshrined in the great
Dictionary of Littre."
Now as to the origin of the word; we have seen above that Rochefort was
the first to use the expression faire la couvade.
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